“I don’t know when, or where, but I can guarantee that every one of you will be raped.” -Deputy Trudy Wiegel, Reno 911
This “info” graphic is making the rounds. Too bad it is bullshit.
Of course, it is not fashionable to ever pollute the “rape culture” discussion with facts. Facts are sexist. So Mark Bennett must be sexist, because he’s forcibly sodomizing the dumb piece of shit who put this “info” graphic together with a throbbing cock made of facts right over here.
A 1996 study provides “Every year since 1989, in about 25 percent of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI where results could be obtained (primarily by State and local law enforcement), the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing.” More patriarchy sponsored oppression facts here.
Now go get your fuckin’ shine box. Because you know what? Crying “wolf” doesn’t help legitimate victims, it hurts them.
As counsel for the blogger in the Steubenville case, nobody can claim that I’m blind to the under-reported rape issue. Further, I have close friends who “didn’t bother” to report their rapes — and I actually daydream, occasionally, about hunting down the fuckers and cutting their cocks off. I’m as angry as an un-punished rape as the most rabid screaming women’s studies professor. But, it makes me pretty stabby when someone tries to help, but really hurts the cause.
The prior version of this piece erroneously interpreted a third party post.
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A very detailed take-down of the chart is also available here: http://glpiggy.net/2013/01/08/a-graphic-display-the-anatomy-of-a-lie/ Bennett’s is obviously very good as well.
What stuck out for me when I first saw the graphic was “How do they know how many rapes go unreported if, by their nature, they are unreported?” and “Shouldn’t many of the reported and/or faced trial but not jailed be considered falsely accused?”
A question on the 25% figure. Does that mean that the rape didn’t happen or that they ID’d the wrong suspect? Because of a number of the most appalling DNA exonerations I’ve read about where not where a rape didn’t happen but where the police (and subsequently the victim) focused on the wrong man. Meaning, of course, they let a real rapist roam free.
That’s a good point actually. The chart technically can’t include falsely accused properly in the same matrix. Only cases where the rape never happened at all fit in this chart. The mistaken identity cases would need to be in a separate chart otherwise all the statistics would be messed up.
Holy fuck.. Check this out (I just realized this on the second look): There are a thousand little guys in this infographic. The maker of the graphic goes with a (ridiculously low) estimate of, by her reckoning, two percent of rape allegation that are false. She represents that two percent with two little guys (the black ones in the lower right corner). But: two little guys out of one thousand is not two percent. It is .2 percent. One fifth of one percent. Even the indefensibly low estimate of two percent, she underepresents by a factor of 10.
Numbers are sexist.
That’s been a source of confusion on this graphic. That’s due to the crappy logic of the group that fabricated it, and also due to them not showing their work.
How it works is that they’re basing the number of false reports off of the number of rape reports as opposed to the number of rapes. They are comparing reports to reports. False rape stats are a function of reports to police (though they ignore the number of false reports that are circulated at the non-institutional level i.e. among friends, family, boyfriends, beatdown squads).
If you bump up the rape report rate to the more widely-accepted stat (Amanda Marcotte herself cites RAINN which claims that 46% of rapes are reported, as per the FBI stats), then you have 460 / 1000. 2% of that is 9-10. If you go with the high end of the widely-accepted false rape report stats, you come out with ~37.
Here’s another wrinkle: most rape incidents are carried out by repeat offenders. Lisak and Miller found that one rapist in their study carried out an average of 4.025 rapes. If you want to compare how many men are falsely accused and also jailed, then you should look also at how many men are doing the raping. If you apply those stats to this hypothetical 1,000 incidents, then you have 248 rapists, 41 jailed (9% of reported rapes lead to prison sentences; ignores other punishments though), and 37 falsely accused men.
So, if your figures are right, the amount of falsely accused men is almost equal to the number of men who actually go to jail for rape?
Yes, if the figures are correct. And these are all figures used by the group that created the graphic. They just cherry-picked data. The woman in charge of Enliven Project wrote that she chose a 10% report rate – a “dramatic” choice, in her words.
From there, it depends on the false accusation rate. Some have put it as low as 0% and others have put it up over 80%. One academic famously put it at 41%. David Lisak recently put the figure at 5.9%, and that was the percent of reports that were proven to be false. We could assume that some false reports were still not proven false.
If we went with 6% then it’s 41 jailed versus 28 falsely accused. Either way, pertaining to the graphic, tweaking the assumption over the rape report rate greatly diminishes the appeal of the graphic. There are more little red guys and little black guys and both of those increases drag on the original argument put forth by Enliven.
Technically, the number they used isn’t ‘falsely accused’ at all, it’s ‘false rape reports’. One of the most common tells that a rape report may be false is that it *doesn’t* accuse a particular person.
In other words, most of the false reports do not accuse anyone. And, of course, a man can be falsely accused multiple times or by multiple people – which is likely pretty common among ‘false accusations’ because it gives credibility.
Just like if you have 1000 rape incidents you only likely have ~250 rapists, so if you have 100 false rape reports you like only have a handful of falsely accused people.
That said, there’s no way at all to know how many of those proven innocent (or guilty) were actually falsely accused. And it’s possible most false reports have no accused not because most false reports don’t name an accused, but because most false reports that do name an accused are never proven false. Proving that something didn’t happen is nearly impossible.
tldr; There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. You can make them say pretty much whatever you want.
If 25% of the DNA samples in rape kits exclude the suspect, those are only the cases where he and she haven’t had sex at all (lately).
How many more cases are there where they had consensual sex, but she regretted it afterwards (thus in her mind magically turning it into “rape”), or where she is mad at him for some other reason and decided to punish him by lying? (This is especially likely in places like Washington State, where the law doesn’t even require prosecutors to prove non-consent — proof that they had sex is enough to convict. It’s outrageous that the appeals courts haven’t overturned this.)
None of this is to say that rape is OK — but only that the more awful the crime and the higher the punishment, the MORE (not less) due process and benefit of doubt must be given to accused persons, so that the law doesn’t destroy more innocent lives than it protects.
This is one of several reasons why we should all be celebrating the non-renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.
I’ve read some very accurate takedowns of this graphic at blogs.
There is no men’s rights movement until such takedowns occur at mainstream media.
That the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and Slate could all propagate this bullshit without any sort of fact checking or later discussion of their mistake is shameful.
[…] The Legal Satyricon, Updated: That “info” graphic about rape? Bend it over, slap its ass, and forcibly fuck i… […]
Noted novelist, political writer, and journalist George Orwell certainly had hackneyed phrases like ‘Rape Culture’ in mind when he wrote, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” (Orwell, George; “Politics and the English Language” (1946), Essay criticising ‘ugly and inaccurate’ contemporary written English).
And although sexual rape can never be condoned, the more prevalent form of rape, IMO, is the rape of the U.S. Constitution, which occurs every minute of everyday; committed by many in our government, including, but not limited to, those in law enforcement and the courts . . .